Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:05AM
from the float-like-a-butterfly-literally dept.

waderoush writes "The San Diego Zoo has built a world famous reputation as a tourist destination, for helping to rescue the California Condor, and maybe (if you're old enough) for Joan Embery's appearances with Johnny Carson. Now the zoo is using its expertise to drive innovation by establishing a new 'Centre for Bioinspiration.' While the Anglicized spelling of 'center' might seem pretentious, the zoo has a down-to-earth goal of innovating through the emerging field of biomimicry, which is exemplified by Qualcomm's Mirasol display technology (the displays generate colors using the same type of interference between light waves that causes iridescence in butterfly wings). The center includes an incubator for developing new bio-inspired products and technologies, where ideas would be advanced to a proof of concept or working model, and then licensed. The incubator also intends to help develop bio-inspired ideas from outside the zoo."

You must be American to believe words can have social standing, I mean damn I guess that is why you had a war on "terror".I am glad I am not a word in the dictionary, sounds like a very oppressive place to be.:-/

And those 'others' include all the Commonwealth countries, and former French colonies. Really, only the Americans spell it 'Center'- so they're the pretentious ones, going around making up their own 'special' version of English. Pretentious gits.

Words don't have social standing? Try saying "what the fuck" next time you go for a job interview. If you live in the UK, the way you use language is a major class signifier. I remember mentioning the movie "Educating Rita" to a British colleague, and wincing at his characterization of the title character.

I agree that the whole concept of a "war on terror" is bogus. But that's not strictly an American thing. To quote George Orwell, "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respe

It's a bit idiotic to spell it as "centre", yes. That's not how it's spelled in the States. Do we consider it pretentious...?... absolutely, yes. While you can get away with theatre for theater when your subject is legit theater, you'd get mocked as pretentious if your "theatre" was in reference to a street puppet show.

But.. Centre? That's nothing but elitists trying to distance themselves from the low-brow American and aping the erudite and superior European -- neither stereotype, of course, is accurate. It is what it is, though, and pretentious Americans tend to latch on to European spellings, habits, etc etc etc, in an effort to appear more fancy and sophisticated.

It's shallow, trite, and pointless -- and those who made the choice did so intentionally to affect an air of elegance and nobility. That's pretentious, yes.

Centre? That's nothing but elitists trying to distance themselves from the low-brow American and aping the erudite and superior European

Oh gawd. Not everything is about "elitists". When you see two spellings used, it's hard to remember which one is correct for your country. Probably most people who say "centre" think that that's the correct spelling when you talk about a building as opposed to a geometrical concept.

What? Um, no. Hard to remember which one is correct? Give me a break -- this is American English 101. Words don't end with -re, over a century ago they were changed to "-er". The ONLY time you'll see "centre" is on foreign-sourced and non-localized media.

Any Americans who use "centre" over "center", excepting those who have immigrated from an English-speaking nation that uses English-English, is doing so purposefully to affect a European feel to whatever it is they're saying or labeling -- because in t

You're reaching for fucking straws. Do you think they ACCIDENTALLY misspelled center as centre? It was *absolutely* a conscious decision.

I love how you're painting me as a right-wing whacko, though, merely because I'm not such an idiot to excuse away pretentiousness as a simple accident or misremembrance. No, asking for a type of mustard you like is not pretentious. Don't be a fucking idiot any more than you already have been.

Calling this place a "Centre" as opposed to "Center" is pretentious. It's a U

No, it's like the old days, when words were in "books", such as "dictionaries".

New words come into use all the time. How many things do we say now that has no entry in a dictionary yet? Bioengineering wasn't in dictionaries until ~1955. Before that, I suppose we had cynics like you trying to mock it since it's a newer concept? Give me a break.

It would be correct if this was in the UK, or Australia. Maybe Canada, I'm actually not sure how they spell it.. but here in the States nobody spells it that way. Here, it's tire, not tyre. It's jail, not gaol. Center, not centre. Color, not colour.

The other spellings are recognized, and not incorrect.. but not correct, either.

But hey, I'm sure the English don't mind one bit when the English-English spelling of a word is discarded for the American English spelling of a word, right?

It's practically the definition of pretentious. There is no reason to use the UK spelling in the states outside of marketing purposes, unless you're all from the UK and can't drop the habit. They're just using the centre spelling opposed to center to appear more sophisticated because that's often an image Joe Random here tends to get in their heads when we think about European culture, regardless of its grounding in reality. It's nothing more than a marketing tactic.

Canada, yes. We try as much as possible to use the correct spelling of words we've stolen from other languages- it at least gives a nod to the original owners. Americans are like 'Pfft, this old word? Hell no, we made it up! Sure, it sounds just like yours, and means the same, but we totally made it up ourselves- look! It's not even spelled the same! We've got "color", "advertize", "monetize", "monopolize", "bastardize", and "center", just to mention a few! And they're spelled proper, too!'

5. What is the purpose of biomimicry? Don't give me an example - give me some idea of why it's useful so I want to read more;

6. The display "generate colors" - submitter was clearly so proud of being able to insert a non-pretentious Americanised spelling that he forgot his gramma;

7. (don't explain things in brackets like this);

8. For "products and technologies, where ideas would be advanced to a proof of concept or working model...", see 3. Too much babble. How about "An incubator will develop proofs of concept or working models for licensing";

9. What is "bioinspiration"?

Why, yes, I did get out on the wrong side of the bed this morning, but that doesn't excuse this summary.

I'll take the trace-elements of pretentiousness and excessive punctuation allegedly within the article-summary gladly before I'll tolerate another narcissistic frothing comment from another hissing pedant of trivialities. Lighten up folks. Why not be satisfied that other slashers are trying. As if the NSA couldn't find some old POS you wrote somewhere along the path of life. And the same for anyone else too. Also, don't take this personally -- it was an opportunity to address multiple grouches at once. At least you provided what could possibly be argued as constructive criticism.

I didn't get up on the wrong side of the bed; I just aint gotten into it yet.

Primary source authors can often get away with doing neither well - their readers know the field and can fill in the gaps. But the only purpose of a site like Slashdot, pointless comment threads excepted, is to effectively communicate on what is reported elsewhere.

The same problem is apparent in Wikipedia. There are clearly many Wikipedia authors who either know the established parts of their field well or who know where to find relevant information. But it is so rare to find people who are good at presenting information. There is, alas, a modern notion that it is sufficient to merely know something but unnecessary to be able to understand and articulate your factoid. I have have never seen people more angry at me than when I ask them to explain themselves.

Beautifully said and even informative; but I still think the 'community' could use a little less venom and bit more positive input. The comment directly below says a lot. Not only do superfluous vilifications of the author distract from the article, many are oft no more eloquent than what they strive to belittle.
Now on to Biomimicry?

. Not only do superfluous vilifications of the author distract from the article

The author invited it with his superfluous vilification of the use of the word "Centre" right at the top of the summary, and it has had the effect of turning the enter focus of discussion away from whatever the hell "bioinspiration" is to debating the degree of pretentiousness of an inoffensive word.

So far all we've established is that I don't like bad writing. Maybe I make it better. Maybe I just sit back and mock it. Maybe I was Willy on Wheels. When you conjecture, you might as well conjecture big.

Wikipedia groans under the weight of [people who you think make it lighter]

Now that was just funny all by its lonesome.

Who else would have even made the connection to Wikipedia?

When discussing the art of communication in the context of summarising existing information, it seems relevant to mention the biggest effort in summarising existing information that the world has ever seen.

The same problem is apparent in Wikipedia. There are clearly many Wikipedia authors who either know the established parts of their field well or who know where to find relevant information. But it is so rare to find people who are good at presenting information. There is, alas, a modern notion that it is sufficient to merely know something but unnecessary to be able to understand and articulate your factoid. I have have never seen people more angry at me than when I ask them to explain themselves.

How has it been refined? Why has it been refined? Why isn't this indicated in the summary?

Also, you could have realized it's a new word for you and googled it

Yeah, I also could follow other passive news aggregators or read domain-specific news sites or perhaps wait for the centre to find something worth publishing in an academic journal. All of these things are possible without visiting Slashdot.

to make it one you know.

And that's another problem with the Internet - people feel that you can learn something just by using a layman's search engine like Google and checking a site or two. Google is grea

Uh, yeah, "be who you are" does not mean mass murder. I see what you did there.

Without a doubt, the douchiest Americans I have ever met were the ones who went out of their way to show how un-American they were. When you live in a virtual UN of people, you learn to appreciate humans for who they are. You're from outer Farkistan? Rock on man, do your thing. You're from Iowa? Let's see you throw a party with barbecued corn. You're from the UK? Cool man, that's your wife in the burka. You just do wha

You pick up the speech patterns of people you hang out with. I can't say I've picked up much, if any, but I hang out with and talk to a lot of British folks every day, and if something came out, I wouldn't try to suppress it. That's being who you are. Hanging on to the same way you talked yesterday and ridiculing anyone who doesn't do the same is just part of being a bitter old... douche.

It's "innovation" that really gets my goat - "drive" is just yellow icing on the turd. But your suggestion would produce the most degenerate adjectival phrase. A phrase is more than a sequence of words, except in the dictionaries which try to claim otherwise.

Obviously to Mimic Life, you ignorant twit.

That's the meaning. I might as well have asked you, "What's the purpose of a cat?" and received the response, "To have four legs and a tail," you armpit-smelling bureaucrat.

Fortunously us US citizens utilize our amazing organic information processing units and thus can forgive a few errors

*Hands in geek card* Would it be offensive to suggest the Chinese are going to be super-badass in the field of Biomimicry in the future? They sure are getting a lot of experience in reverse-engineering.

There have been some pretty impressive biomimicry innovations in adhesives through beetles. By skipping to minute 45:50 of this pretty neat BBC documentary, Plastic - How it Works [youtube.com], you can see a cool example.

According to the next article, this apparently means that this new center won't really do anything. After reading how "buzz-wordy" the summary was, I can see why the authors feel that way. All this summary said to me was "zoo buzzword buzzword buzzword' which translates to "zoo overpriced dull ill-advised".

When I saw "biomimicry incubator" I thought "hey cool, an incubator more like the underside of a duck's ass, will that improve incubation times or something? Or is this the first step towards axolotl tanks?" And then I found out that they were using the word "incubator" in the stupid slangy sense, not the literal one. That's what makes it a stupid cutesy name, and thus, a stupid cutesy title for the article. It's not an incubator, it's a laboratory or maybe a think tank if you want to get traditionally cute

I see you never finished the series. The axolotl tanks turned out to be human women. As to "incubator," that's a business term, and IMO shouldn't be used on a nerd site without explanation. I mean, you wouldn't talk about pions on a business site without explaining what they were... if an MBA could actually understand the explanation in the first place. It would be like Sheldon trying to explain something to Penny.

I have two recollections of the San Diego Zoo, despite never having been there: the first is of Joan Embry, on Carson; the other is Jerry Pournelle, speaking as the character "Nat Reynolds," giving a shout-out to his brother George in the pages of Footfall -- George had some rhinos to house at the zoo, but he didn't know what temperature they needed their water at. So, he threw a gradient across the pool and let them figure it out.

Unfortunately, to avoid an Off-Topic mod, I don't know how many commas he mis